PS3 Has “Tight memory, Poor IO Performance” – John Carmack

[yo_john117]

_mevildan said:

Seems I must assume id/carmack defense position again.

The PC version was a mess up because of the rubbish drivers that AMD put out. All I will say is that:
1.) The PC version played perfectly at QuakeCon.
2.) Developer drivers aren't the same as release drivers.
3.) Carmack said they worked closely with AMD before the launch of Rage but in the end, drivers on launch day were a screw up. Even AMD acknowledged they messed up the driver.

As for the PS3 "issues"... I am endlessly amused when people pull out Naughty Dog as their slam-dunk example of PS3 = Christ.

Uncharted:
-33ms game tick
-Repeating tiled-texture system.

Rage:
-16ms game tick
-unique streaming texture system.

The texture pop-in visible on the PS3 is the BEST they can do. Uncharted doesn't have to do these jobs:
1.) Isolate texture pages based on player view
2.) Check blu-ray disc and hard disk install (Sony only allowed id 8gb) and temp cache visible textures and stream from disk cache.
3.) Transcode texture pages into system memory/disk cache/video memory at mutliple mip levels.

PS3 limitations:
1.) Slow(er) buffered IO reads.
2.) Less available memory than Xbox 360
3.) Smaller max tile size (Carmack said it himself. Max texture size smaller on PS3). Shhhh. Don't tell anyone, but this forced them to go with the smaller tex size on both consoles. Shhh.
4.) Forced to stream at least two thirds of the data from the very slow blu-ray drive on the PS3.

id tried all they could to make the experience the best it could be on PS3:
1.) They said that the cell is allocated texture page transcoding jobs constantly when available.
2.) They twisted arms to get 8gb out of Sony for an install (when the full 22gb would be ideal).

And the end result... a fantastic looking game that doesn't quite keep up to speed with other platforms but is still a great technical achievement.

Carmack said at Quakecon as far as physics heavy scenes go, the PS3 pulls ahead of the X360. But (some) PS3 fans don't want to hear faint praise for their console. They literally want a spunk load, or nothing else.

Seems people will ignore all the facts and just cry "Waa waa waa. Naughty Dog! Killzone! TEH CELL!"

PS: I have a PS3 with 60+ games and no Xbox 360. Take from that what you will.

Wow /thread